painting from nature. At the age of twenty he went to London, drew for a while in the British Museum, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy. He then returned to Canterbury, where he was able to earn a living as a drawing-master and by the sale of sketches and drawings. In 1827 he settled in Brussels; but four years later he returned to London to live, and by showing his first picture at the Royal Academy (1833) began an unprecedentedly prolonged career as an exhibitor. Cooper’s name is mainly associated with pictures of cattle or sheep, and the most notable of the many hundred he produced are: “A Summer’s Noon” (1836), “A Drover’s Halt on the Fells” (1838), “A Group in the Meadows” (1845), “The Half-past One o’Clock Charge at Waterloo” (1847), “The Shepherd’s Sabbath” (1866), “The Monarch of the Meadows” (1873), “Separated but not Divorced” (1874), “Isaac’s Substitute” (1880), “Pushing off for Tilbury Fort” (1884), “On a Farm in East Kent” (1889), “Return to the Farm, Milking Time” (1897). He was elected A.R.A. in 1845 and R.A. in 1867. He presented to his native place, in 1882, the Sidney Cooper Art Gallery, built on the site of the house in which he was born. He wrote his reminiscences, under the title of My Life, in 1890; and died on the 7th of February 1902.
COOPERAGE, or Coperage (Flemish and Dutch kooper, a trader, dealer), a system of traffic in spirituous liquors, tobacco
and other articles amongst the fishermen in the North Sea. The
practice began in the middle of the 19th century, when Flemish
and Dutch koopers frequented the fishing fleets for the purpose of
barter. Trading first in tobacco, they extended their operations,
and soon became practically floating grog-shops.
The demoralizing nature of the traffic was brought to the public notice in 1881, and a convention was held at the Hague in 1882 to consider means of remedying the abuses. In 1887 Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France and the Netherlands signed an agreement to prevent the sale or purchase of spirituous liquors among fishermen at sea. In Great Britain an act (the North Sea Fisheries Act 1888) was passed to carry into effect the terms of the convention. The act (now repealed and replaced by the North Sea Fisheries Act 1893, with which it is identical but for some slight verbal modifications) imposes a fine not exceeding £50 or a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months for supplying, exchanging or otherwise selling spirits. It imposes a like penalty for purchasing spirits by exchange or otherwise, and requires every British vessel dealing in provisions or other articles to have a licence and to carry a special mark. In 1882 Mr E. J. Mather started a mission to deep sea fishermen, which sends out mission ships and supplies the fishermen with good clothing, literature, tobacco, &c., at a fair price. This mission, now the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, is registered by the Board of Trade.
See E. J. Mather, Nor’ard of the Dogger (1888), and publications of the Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen.
COOPERAGE (from “cooper,” a maker of casks, derived from
such forms as Mid. Dutch cuper, Ger. Küfer, Lat. cuparius; the
same root is seen in various Teut. words for a basket, such as
Dutch kuip and Eng. “kipe” and “coop,” but cooper is apparently
not formed directly from “coop,” which never means a
“cask” but always a basket-cage for poultry, &c.), the art of
making casks, barrels and other rounded vessels, the sides of
which are composed of separate staves, held together by hoops
surrounding them. The art is one of great antiquity; Pliny ascribes
its invention to the inhabitants of the Alpine valleys. The trade
is one in which there are numerous subdivisions, the chief of
which are tight or wet and dry or slack cask manufacture.
To these may be added white cooperage, a department which
embraces the construction of wooden tubs, pails, churns and other
even-staved vessels. Of all departments, the manufacture of
tight casks or barrels for holding liquids is that which demands
the greatest care and skill since, in addition to being perfectly
tight when filled with liquid, the vessels must bear the strain of
transportation to great distances, and in many cases have to
resist considerable internal pressure when they contain fermenting
liquors. The staves are best made of well-seasoned oak.
Since a cask is a double conoid, usually having its greatest
diameter (technically the bulge or belly) at the centre, each
stave must be properly curved to form a segment of the whole,
and must be so cut as to have a suitable bilge or increase of
width from the ends to the middle; it must also have its edges
bevelled to such an angle that it will form tight joints with its
neighbours. The staves being prepared, the next operation is to
set up or raise the barrel. For this purpose as many staves as are
necessary are arranged upright in a circular frame, and round
their lower halves are fitted truss hoops which serve to keep
them together for the permanent hooping. The upper ends are
then drawn together by means of a rope which is passed round
them and tightened by a windlass, and other truss hoops are
dropped over them, the wood being steamed or heated to enable
it to bend freely to shape. The two ends of the cask are next
finished to receive the heads by forming the chime, or bevel on
the extremity of the staves, and the croze or groove into which
the heads fit. Finally the heads and permanent hoops are put in
place. The heads, when made of two or more pieces, are jointed
by wooden dowel pins, and after being cut to size are chamfered
or bevelled round the edge to fit into the croze grooves. The
hoops are generally of iron. The manufacture of slack casks
proceeds on the same general lines, but is simpler in various
respects, both because less accurate workmanship is required, and
because softer woods, largely fir, may be employed. Machinery of
the most elaborate and specialized character has been devised to
perform most of the operations in making both slack and tight
casks, and though it involves considerable capital outlay it
effects so great an economy of time that it has largely superseded
hand labour. (For an account of such machinery see L. H. Ransome,
“Cask-making Machinery,” Proc. Inst. Civ. Eng. vol. 115;
also an article in Engineering, 1908, 85, p. 845.) Barrels without
separate staves are made by bending a sheet of wood, sawn from
a log in a continuous strip, into the required circular shape, the
bulge at the centre being obtained by cutting out V gores from
the ends. Barrels are also sometimes made of steel, either of the
ordinary bulging form or consisting of straight-sided drums
provided near the middle with rings on which they may be rolled.
Immense numbers of casks of different shapes and sizes are
employed in various industries. Tight barrels are a necessity to
the wine and cider maker, brewer and distiller, and are largely
used for the transport of oils and liquid chemicals, while slack
barrels are utilized by the million for packing cement, alkali,
china, fruit, fish and numerous other products.
CO-OPERATION, a term used particularly both for a theory of life, and for a system of business, with the general sense
of “working together” (con, with, and opus, work). In its
narrowest usage it means a combination of individuals to economize
by buying in common, or increase their profits by selling in
common. In its widest usage it means the creed that life may
best be ordered not by the competition of individuals, where each
seeks the interest of himself and his family, but by mutual help;
by each individual consciously striving for the good of the social
body of which he forms part, and the social body in return
caring for each individual: “each for all, and all for each” is its
accepted motto. Thus it proposes to replace among rational and
moral beings the struggle for existence by voluntary combination
for life. More or less imperfectly embodying this theory, we have
co-operation in the concrete, or “the co-operative movement,”
meaning those forms of voluntary association where individuals
unite for mutual aid in the production of wealth, which they will
devote to common purposes, or share among them upon principles
of equity, reason and the common good, agreed upon beforehand.
Not that a co-operative society can begin by saying absolutely what those principles in their purity would dictate. It begins with current prices, current rates of wages and interest, current hours of labour, and modifies them as soon as it can wherever they seem least conformable to equity, reason and the common good.
In the industrial world there is everywhere much working together for the production of wealth, but this is not included in co-operation if the shares of those concerned are determined by
